Category Archives:Editing

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Note: This post was originally published in 2014, and was updated in March 2018.

Whether you love editing or hate it, if you’re a writer, there’s no way to avoid it.

You may well have support – from beta readers, your spouse, your writers’ circle, or a professional editor – but a fair amount of editing needs to be done alone.

I find that “editing” encompasses three distinct stages. If you’re writing a blog post, each of these might take minutes; for a novel, they might take months … but however long or short your work, they’re all important.

A lot of writers will insist that you should never, ever edit when you’re writing.

You can even use software that disables the backspace key, or that starts eating your words if you don’t type fast enough (Write or Die).

Personally, I think a rather more balanced approach is fine!

While too much editing when you’re writing can be a real problem, if you’re occasionally hopping back a few sentences to tweak something, or if you backspace every so often to fix a typo, that’s fine. (I type fast, which means I tend to end up correcting mistakes several times in a sentence…)

Here are my rules of thumb for keeping writing and editing as distinct as reasonably possible:

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The above video is only one of over 100 recorded sessions from BlogWorld & New Media Expo New York 2012. You can get all of the videos – plus bonus interviews and other bonus content – by picking up the entire Virtual Ticket here.

Have you ever read a book that was way too wordy? (For me, Stephen Covey’s otherwise excellent 7 Habits of Highly Effective People comes to mind…)

The content itself might have been good – but the substance ended up buried beneath a froth of unnecessary words. Perhaps you found it hard to stay focused, or you simply stopped reading.

When you write – especially if you’re writing online – it’s important to avoid waffle. At best, a vague and waffly piece won’t have a strong impact on the reader. At worst, you’ll not only lose readers, they’ll mentally note you down as a writer to avoid.

I must admit that I am beginning to enjoy the redrafting and editing phase of my work a whole lot more since working with you as my Writing Coach, I now spend time looking at specific words and phrases and really making sure if they fit with the message I am conveying.

I am really enjoying the process but worry that the constant redrafting may be holding me back as well.

This brings up a great question: how much redrafting and editing is too much?